1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the technical field of a virtual reality three-dimensional multi-participant interactive system and, more specifically to a method of rapidly determining the transmission time and range of a position message under an Internet virtual reality environment.
2. Description of Related Art
In recent years, due to fast development of virtual reality and network technology, various 3D (three-dimensional) multi-user interactive systems have been disclosed for users from different countries around the world to talk to one another or to make other interactions in a virtual reality scene. Following the popularity of Internet, the application of 3D multi-user interactive systems has become more and more popular.
In a 3D multi-user interactive system, as shown in FIG. 3, the interactions among the users 31 in the virtual scene 32 are transmitted through a network 33. Therefore, interactive messages of the users in the virtual scene 32 must be quickly transmitted and processed. If the transmission of interactive messages cannot be quickly processed due to the delay of the network 33, the picture at the user end becomes unstable, resulting in low usability of the 3D multi-user interactive system.
When more users 31 are connected to the line at the same time in the same virtual world, the efficiency of the system becomes degraded because lots of messages must be processed. Furthermore, because the Internet is of a highly delayed and low bandwidth environment, there is a limit to real time requirement in a 3D multi-user system. In order to achieve acceptable real time interactive requirement, certain schemes, such as dead reckoning and timer, are used to reduce network bandwidth demand in a multi-user virtual environment.
The timer scheme is to use a timer to count a predetermined time value, so as to transmit a message 34 for informing all participated users 31 to update their states when the time is up and there is a significant difference in the state of the virtual environment. The dead reckoning scheme is to estimate the position of the participated users 31 that has not received the interactive message by an algorithm, and to transmit the position message 34 only when the difference between the estimated value and the value of the real position of the participated user 31 in the scene is larger than a threshold value, so as to reduce the number of network packets to be transmitted.
However, when more and more users are connected to the 3D multi-user interactive system at the same time, the quantity of network packets to be received and processed by the computer at the user end is greatly increased. As a result, the aforesaid schemes cannot satisfy the practical requirements. Therefore, it is desirable to provide an improved method to mitigate and/or obviate the aforementioned problems.